Case Study: ETH Zurich achieves 99.99%+ availability and sub‑1s page loads with Varnish Software (Varnish Enterprise & Professional Services)

ETH turned to Varnish Enterprise to solve their complex caching needs

ETH Zurich, a leading Swiss science and technology university, runs a highly federated web environment of over 600 sites managed by its IT services team. Their Adobe AEM setup with Adobe Dispatcher could not provide the granular caching or availability required—Dispatcher excessively invalidated content and the environment struggled to meet a 99.99% uptime SLA.

ETH replaced Dispatcher with Varnish Cache and then moved to Varnish Enterprise (with two Varnish nodes in front of two publishing servers) and engaged Varnish Professional Services for training. The change enabled coordinated caches, high availability and simpler configuration; results included page loads dropping from ~2.5s to under 1s, backend load reduced roughly 12x, the 99.99% SLA exceeded, and two full‑time staff freed to focus on other projects.

ETH Zurich

Cristian Tuduce

ETH IT Services